The Mother

Birmingham Repertory Theatre

5 Stars

"It is hard to find much merit in The Mother except as a sop to the converted." The scholarly critic who wrote that assessment should have been present at this production of Bertolt Brecht's early teaching play. He might have changed his mind.

Brecht wrote his group of "Lehrstucke" in the 1930s after the phenomenal success of The Threepenny Opera had both delighted and disappointed him.

His hopes that his question: "What is robbing a bank, compared with running a bank?" might open people's eyes were frustrated when the largely bourgeois Berlin audiences left gaily whistling Kurt Weill's sweet-sour tunes, oblivious to the mirror that had been held before them.

These plays were designed to be played to non-theatre-going audiences in their clubs and even in their work places, to reveal in stark dramatic terms the realities of the exploitative society in which they struggled daily to survive.

The Mother, set in pre-revolutionary Russia and based on the novel by Maxim Gorky, tells - or rather reveals - the story of Pelagea Vlassova in a series of short scenes.

Illiterate and, like most of her neighbours, passively accepting that her lot in life has been preordained and is unchangeable, she is drawn into revolutionary activity in order to save her son, a member of the fledgling Communist Party.

Her son is imprisoned and finally shot, leaving his bereaved mother determined to carry on the struggle to organise and educate her fellow workers.

The production is one of the events curated by Mark Ravenhill for the rep's Epic Encounters, a festival of performances and protest celebrating Brecht the poet and playwright.

Director Tessa Walker expertly handles a huge cast drawn from the local community and Brecht's recognition that amateur actors could bring a sense of reality to their work is brilliantly demonstrated in this production.

Most of the full-house audience would have recognised Lorna Laidlaw's Vlassova as Mrs Tembe from BBC's Doctors and here she invests the long-suffering heroine with a humanity critics mistakenly often deny the playwright could ever have intended.

Hanns Eisler's score, with none of the seductive ironies of Weill, is sung in chorus with superb attack by the whole cast. They are conducted by a strikingly young Brecht look-alike.

The clearly unconventional audience at last weekend's performance would surely have delighted Brecht.

The concentrated attention and responses to the moments of humour - as when the naive Vlassova assures her son and his comrades that the police would surely not interfere with their peaceful industrial protest march - registered not only admiration for the excellence of a cast drawn from a world of shared experience but surely an understanding of the lesson carried by the drama.

Tellingly, outside in the theatre foyer there is a table for foodbank donations.

The Epic Encounters festival runs until April 12, details www.birmingham-rep.co.uk.